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| Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi
Outcast |
Reviewed by Chris 'Gwynhala'
Burke |
Developer: Raven Software
Producer: Lucas
Arts Entertainment Company LLC
Publisher: Activision
Download
Demo
Release Date: 03/27/2002
 Here
I sit writing my review of Star Wars® Jedi Knight® II: Jedi Outcast™ on
the eve of the release of the new Star Wars movie. I'm thinking to myself
that I enjoyed this game, but that it wasn't the "10.0" that so many have rated
it. And I'm hoping very, very much that Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the
Clones will surpass Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace as much
as this game surpasses its predecessor.
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast is the sequel to LucasArts'
1997 release Star Wars Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II. The original introduced
gamers to Kyle Katarn, Jedi anti-hero, and the joy of wielding the lightsaber
and the Force in a glorious 3D. It featured an innovative technique of switching
from the 1st person view used with blasters and other weapons, to a 3rd person
view for more realistic control and self-awareness of the lightsaber. An add-on
pack, Star Wars Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith, introduced new
missions, better puzzles, additional force powers and a playable female model,
the Sith apprentice Mara Jade. The add-on pack also changed gameplay significantly:
where the first title differentiated strongly between light side and dark
side force powers, the second title made all force powers neutral.
 The
light side / dark side distinction is back in JKII, along with the
brooding Kyle Katarn.
As our story opens he's sworn off the lightsaber and the Force , and is working
as a mercenary for the New Republic with his pilot / main squeeze, Jan Ors.
Kyle and Jan receive a garbled transmission about an Imperial Remnant searching
for the Valley of the Jedi, an immensely powerful source of Force power. Their
investigation leads them, together and apart, through military bases, secret
laboratories, the Jedi Academy, smuggler's dens, dangerous mines, enemy star
cruisers, flying cities, and battles to the death with the would-be
Emperor and his Dark Jedi Master.
Graphics
 Star
Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast features spectacular graphics, lighting,
character and set design fully consistent with the Star Wars universe.
The outdoor levels feel big, open, and immersive. The indoor levels convincingly
portray huge and detailed cityscapes, interstellar spacecraft, and landing bays.
Many of the cutscenes in JKII appear to have been rendered using the
game engine itself - a technique Raven Software also used in their 3rd person
masterpiece, Heretic II. Additional techniques appear to have been
used to enhance the cutscenes; these techniques allowed the designers to create
exciting effects impossible with the engine alone.
 For
example, JKII features some compelling cutscenes of spacecraft flying
across a complex background. In each of these scenes, the image pixelates
as if a pre-rendered high-resolution video had been compressed to produce
a low bandwidth video stream for use in-game. The overall effect is beautiful,
despite the noticeable degradation in video quality during these cutscenes.
The cutscenes make great use of facial morphs and body language to convey
emotional reactions of the characters. The eyes blink, roll, and narrow. The
lips purse, smirk, and frown. In surprising contrast, the lip-synch in cutscenes
is little more than "muppet mouths" opening and closing in time
to the speech.
 During
the game you run into the same kinds of enemies over and over again. The most
common enemies include Tuskens, Rodians, Gran, and Stormtroopers. Relatively
few skins are provided for these, and so they literally all look alike. That's
OK for the Stormtroopers, but the lack of variety in the other races sometimes
drags the story down from "adventure" to "shooter".
The character animations range from stiff and unnatural (for example, Kyle's
walk and run animations, or the Gran detonator-tossing animation), to smooth
and dynamic (for example, the acrobatic lightsaber dueling animations used
by Kyle, Luke, Desann, and the Dark Jedi). I especially liked some of the
mechanical animations, including the movement of the protocol droids, the walker's low
and high gears.
 The
attractive dynamic lighting and volumetric shadows in JKII are pretty
par for the course from id's latest engine. Strangely, the lightsaber
doesn't cast light onto walls when dynamic lighting is enabled - an effect
that would have come in handy in more than one dark passageway.
The polygon counts of the models seem just about right - things that should
be curved, look curved, and the structural models and textures combine to
produce the illusion of a highly-detailed world.
The 3rd person camera is nearly flawless, perhaps even better than it was
in Heretic II. An improvement over earlier Jedi Knight titles, JKII
allows you to switch freely between the 1st person and 3rd person views, regardless
of your weapon choice. The most noticeable camera issue occurs when Kyle is
standing with a wall immediately behind him, looking up in the 3rd person
view. In this situation the camera moves inside Kyle, and an annoying ghost of the back-sides
of his polygons appears on-screen. The player can often eliminate this effect
by shifting Kyle's position slightly.
 Two
final notes on the graphics of JKII. First, many of the screenshots
in this review were taken with shadows and dynamic lighting turned off to
improve performance; regardless of what the box describes as the minimum system
configuration, JKII can get kind of choppy running on even a mid-tier
system with all graphics and sound options enabled. Second, screenshots taken
in JKII don't reflect the full graphic capability of the engine since
this game automatically saves screenshots using lossy JPEG compression instead
of the more detailed and disk-hungry Targa / Windows Bitmap formats.
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